Chaos and Cosmos: The Imaginary and the Political in Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

Chaos and Cosmos offers a unique interpretation of Argentine essayist and fictionwriter Jorge Luis Borges as a thinker of the political. While not a political writer inthe traditional sense, Borges was indeed an author whose response to the advent oftotalitarianism—particularly in its Nazi form—generated experimental, insightful, andrigorous short fiction and non-fiction political interrogation. Borges’s thinking of thepolitical related to three main distinctive dimensions: that of the question of the formsof society, the relationship between the imaginary and the real, and the relationshipbetween the Same and the Other.Chaos and Cosmos presents Borges as an experimental writer, an Argentine citizen, athinker of global political phenomena, and a South American Pragmatist. Intertwiningan interpretation of Borges’s writing with the central concerns of thinkers such asWilliam James, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, MichaelFoucault, Beatriz Sarlo, Richard Rorty, and Judith Butler, this book advances its owntheorizing of democracy, totalitarianism, and political agency and alterity along novellines.